Question

I’m trying to blit text onto my surface using this line:

surface.blit(myFont.render(text, 1, text_color),(200,200))

But I get an error: TypeError: Required argument ‘dest’ (pos 2) not found

I can’t seem to figure out why this is happening…

Answer 1

You’re not giving a proper rect as the second argument to the surface.blit() function. It needs to be a rect. I suggest the following:

text=myFont.render(text, 1, text_color)
rect=text.get_rect()
rect.topleft=(200, 200)
surface.blit(text, rect)

To do it all in one line of code, it might get a bit complicated:

surface.blit(myFont.render(text, 1, text_color), pygame.Rect(200, 200, myFont.render(text, 1, text_color).get_rect().width, myFont.render(text, 1, text_color).get_rect().height)

If you want it to be at 200, 200 in the center, the easy, multiple-lined code would look like this:

text=myFont.render(text, 1, text_color)
rect=text.get_rect()
rect.centerx=200
rect.centery=200
surface.blit(text, rect)

In order to do it in one line, it will get rediculously long:

surface.blit(myFont.render(text, 1, text_color), pygame.Rect(200-myFont.render(text, 1, text_color).get_rect().width/2, 200-myFont.render(text, 1, text_color).get_rect().height/2, myFont.render(text, 1, text_color).get_rect().width, myFont.render(text, 1, text_color).get_rect().height)

As you can see, it would be much easier to do it in the five lines of code rather than the one line like you were trying to do, and it would probably be faster too. Basically what you are having to do for one line is both render the text and get its rect for each parameter of the rect in order to avoid an error. This would take a really long time, especially if you were putting this into a loop. If you are doing it doing the loading, it might be alright, but I would still reccommend the multiple lines.